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Officials from the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Global Positioning Systems Wing announced today the award of the Next-Generation GPS Control Segment (OCX) contract to Raytheon Company, Intelligence & Information Systems, Aurora, Colorado. The OCX development contract will be 73 months in duration and with option years for sustainment worth $1,535,147,916. read more

I didn’t plan it this way, but my coverage of GPS 24+3 turned out to be a three-part series, with this column being part three. One reason it turned into a three-part series is because I’m learning more about it along the way, but its mostly because details weren’t released all at once.
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With apologies to James Bond, Ian Fleming, and, well, just about everybody else. Here is a grab from my mail bag. The message was subject-lined: GPS Spy Applications. “I recently suspected my wife of cheating, having been involved with gps as a land surveyor since 1995, I used and application called mobile-spy. “In order to install the application onto an... read more

Call it Madden withdrawal. It’s bad enough that I just endured Super Bowl “XLIV” without the smooth and engaging color commentary of the iconic John Madden, the legendary Hall of Fame, Super Bowl (XI) winning coach and virtual football entrepreneur. This year I patently missed John’s pithy commentary and the distinctive timbre of his voice. Coach Madden’s broadcast career has continued for more than thirty years and his instantly recognizable voice always invokes the desire to watch a football game. I would watch any game he color-commentated even if I did not particularly care about the competitors. It just wasn’t the same Super Bowl this year without John Madden, but somehow I soldiered on. read more

In the few years I’ve been writing this column, very few subjects have warranted back-to-back newsletter coverage. The new GPS 24+3 configuration is one of them. The reason I’ve continued with this discussion is because it will significantly affect your GPS operations, especially if you’re using RTK or DGPS. read more

Can They Be Better?We examine the antenna designs that provide GPS functionality to mobile phones and why most phones still do not provide GPS operation indoors. We also see what it will take to make them better. read more

Currently, no single technology, system, or sensor can provide a positioning solution any time, anywhere. The key is to utilize multiple technologies. We are now exploring a multi-sensor multi-network (MSMN) approach for a seamless indoor-outdoor solution. Its hardware platform is described in the previous article. The digital signal processor (DSP) is embedded in the GPS module. All sensors are integrated to the DSP that hosts core software for real-time sensor data acquisition and real-time processing to estimate user location. A smartphone handset provides wireless network measurements. read more

To enrich user experience of location-based services and personal navigation, three-dimensional models such as those used in urban planning are added to a smartphone platform, without the requirement of additional hardware.
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